12/27/1999 @ 12:00AM

Wealth and Poverty

THE PROBLEM OF POVERTY HAS BEEN SOLVED. IF history is still being written a thousand years from now, it will record that after countless generations of mortal struggle, humanity finally triumphed over material scarcity, in America, at the close of the second millennium.

As to food, the end arrived some time ago. It’s still possible to go to bed hungry in America, but those who do lack mental capacity or social aptitude, not access to food. The main thing soup kitchens supply is outreach and compassion; the cost of the calories is negligible. Rich anorexics need their soup kitchens too, and for similar reasons. Oh yes, we do still have richer and poorer all about us, but that’s relative–it’s poverty that has ended in our time, not inequality.

Most other essentials that once were scarce are now as abundant as calories. In just two centuries of industrial development we have learned how to extract limitless amounts of material from the depths of the earth, and transform it into limitless quantities of shelter and warmth. Yes, there are still those who sleep on the sidewalk. Compassionate and exasperated in equal measure, big-city mayors now enlist the police to force warm beds upon them. It’s the sidewalk, not the shelter, that’s scarce now.

All the rest of the old scarcities are tumbling down the same steep slope, toward unlimited supply at zero cost. Chips and bits are certainly headed that way, and they are pulling the material world along behind them: Year by year, smart technology lets us extract more value at less cost from less stuff. Genetic science will soon give us comparable power over the stuff of life: our own bodies, and most everything that nurtures, afflicts, or cures them.

To be sure, a few tired old Cassandras still discern material limits all around us, but their predictions of famine and exhaustion have been proved so wrong, so many times, that nobody serious listens to them anymore. They are looking in the wrong place. The limits, if there are any, aren’t built into the world outside us; they lie within.

The new poverties are mirror images of the old: they are poverties of excess, not of want. Obesity is the disease of the relatively poor; only the rich, it seems, can afford not to gorge. An excess of outlandish television has created the new poverty of imagination and intellect; only the rich read books. A surfeit of jumbled data contracts understanding and knowledge. Ubiquitous mechanization leaves us physically weak; the rich buy exercise machines that push back. Safety used to be scarce; now we pay extra for risk, or its illusion, on a rockface or a roller coaster. We prize status goods not because we have them, but because others don’t. For all the talk of scarcity in medical care, many of the elderly worry more about the degrading excesses of modern medicine.

Many of our reactions to excess bring to mind fanciful notions of Romans after the feast, staggering off to the vomitorium. Some among us declare most everything we eat–sugar, fats, meats, preservatives and, of course, genetically modified foods–to be polluted or corrupt. Projected into environmental policy, that same attitude supplies an overarching logic for opposing almost any form of industry or enterprise. Cultlike purification movements exist to purge our lives of chemicals, power lines or perfume. A multi-billion-dollar health litigation boondoggle springs from cosmetic choices made by millions of women to enlarge their breasts.

Still, the new abundance should impel wise people to ponder when less really does become more. Until quite recently, wealth was measured by land occupied and subdued, by swamps drained, acres plowed, rivers dammed, tracks laid, highways paved and valleys bridged. “Poor” land was whatever we couldn’t exploit for economic gain. Now the concrete gains surround us, and we yearn for uneconomic forests, uneconomic lakes, uneconomic shores and uneconomic wilderness. The new wealth is defined as the absence of the old. It is the wealth of renunciation.

The idea is not altogether new. The men and women who walked by the Sea of Galilee in the reign of Caesar Augustus were dirt poor by Roman standards, but they craved a different kind of wealth, and some came to believe they had found it. It remains to be seen whether, in all our restless searching for something beyond affluence, we can come up with anything better.